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1. What year was The Island of Dr. Moreau published and who wrote it?
Written by H. G. Wells, published in 1896.
2. What happens to The Lady Vain?
It crashes into a derelict. The crew splits into two boats. One of the
boats contains our narrator and is recovered and towed to Dr. Moreau's
Island.
3. Who is M'ling?
M'ling is one of the more successful instances of Dr. Moreau's
experiments---Montgomery's red-eyed attendant.
4. Define the uncanny.
The uncanny is unsettlingness that suggests the supernatural. The Beast
Folk are so uncanny (even before Edward learns that) because they are
weird and abnormal, their animalism suggesting the sort of supernatural
intervention Moreau undertook.
5. Who was the first person to perform a vivisection in Britain?
Francois Magendie performed the first highly publicized vivisection in
Britain, making the public aware of it.
6. What kind of experiments does Dr. Moreau perform and how does he
justify them? Please give direct quotations.
Dr. Moreau is a vivisector who has taken surgical transformations from
small, individual alterations to entire reworkings of the body.
Specifically, he attempts to turn animal forms into human forms.
He justifies it mostly by ignoring the pain as a factor. "So long as
visible or audible pain turns you sick; so long as your own pains drive
you...I tell you, you are an animal," Monreau tells Edward, "Pleasure
and pain---bah!" Monreau wants Edward to believe that pain is an archaic
measure of cruelty and morality because it's "optional." Moreau believes
he is pursuing a higher goal of "true research," where he follows
inquiry wherever the data takes him regardless of such petty concerns,
in his view.
7. How are the Beast Folk depicted and what characters from The Sign of
Four or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde do they recall?
The Beast Folk are depicted as misshapen, ugly, and wrong on a physical
level. Mentally, they are little smarter than an idiot. The latter count
is mostly irrelevant, but the first is a precise correspondence to Mr.
Hyde and the reaction he draws out of people.
8. Define degeneration.
Degeneration is the opposite of development, a decline from a higher or
more complex form. This is seen in the regression of the beast folk.
9. What's the Uneven U?
The Uneven U is paragraph structure. Arguments connect abstract ideas
(essay motivations) with direct evidence, which is best organized as a
"U" of abstraction, high-level motivation at the beginning and the end,
and analysis and direct evidence in the middle.
10. In the nineteenth century, how did British law define "cruelty?" How
do you think we should define cruelty?
British law originally defined cruelty with "wanton disregard" (i.e.
with no rational explanation). This was later removed, but still Sir
John Day said that cruelty is "something which cannot be justified."
I am uncertain if cruelty should be the line in the sand for if an
experiment can be carried out, but as I see it, cruelty should be based
on the victim's experience---regardless of the perpetrator's motive
unless that reduces the victim's pain in some way. Volunteering is
probably the most basic level at which pain and suffering is acceptable,
but this doesn't translate perfectly to animal subjects, which is why it
should be determined based on suffering of the victim almost
exclusively.
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